Design of Cleveland Clinic's new Cancer Institute packs a subtle precision and clarity

Renderings of the Cleveland Clinic's new Cancer Institute, for which it will break ground Monday, don't convey the subtleties of a design that features clarity, precision and lots of interior daylight.

(William Rawn Associates)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The Cleveland Clinic's newest architectural project, a $276 million Cancer Institute, certainly qualifies as a big addition to the institution and the city.

Nevertheless, anyone who glances briefly at renderings of the project, to be built along Carnegie Avenue at East 105th Street, could be forgiven for feeling mildly underwhelmed.

A panorama shows the construction site for the new Cleveland Clinic Cancer Institute in the foreground, flanked to the left (west) by the Crile Building, and to the north (middle distance) by the Cole Eye Institute.

That's because computer-generated depictions of the seven-story, 377,000-square-foot building, for which the Clinic will break ground Monday, make it look like a subdued echo of a quartet of earlier buildings on the campus designed by architect Cesar Pelli, and built between 1985 and 1999.

Pelli, who also designed Cleveland's Key Tower, the tallest U.S. skyscraper between Philadelphia and Chicago, sculpted his Clinic buildings with unique shapes to avoid monotony.

Other buildings completed since then at the Clinic followed Pelli's lead, but with less conviction and style. They include two hotels along Carnegie and Euclid avenues and a pathology lab on the south side of Carnegie.

Viewed in this context, the Cancer Institute would seem to be the eighth in a line of generally similar buildings on a vast, increasingly homogenized campus. A natural response would be: So what?

As obvious as that conclusion might be, I think it would be wrong.

A closer look at plans for the Cancer Institute, designed by the nationally respected Boston architect William Rawn, shows how it makes subtle but strong moves that should make it a distinctive addition, not an example of Pelli redux.

Key factors in the design (see a presentation at the bottom of this story) include efforts to flood the building's interiors with natural light and views, to create internal pathways with intuitive clarity, and to provide fine-grained details that will give the building an air of precision and individuality.

A typical floor plan shows how the Cleveland Clinic's new Cancer Institute will have exam rooms on north-south corridors that extend from a fully daylighted corridor on the building's south side to infusion rooms on the north side, which will overlook a large, landscaped greensward outside.

The new building should be a significant improvement over Pelli's Taussig Cancer Institute at East 90th Street, now nearly 20 years old.

Taussig, which will be renovated and repurposed by the Clinic, has simply been swamped by the institution's growing cancer practice.

Yet the factors likely to distinguish the new building don't come across in the computer-generated renderings of the design, which make it look flatter, simpler and less precisely tailored than it should look in reality.

In a video interview arranged by the Clinic on Wednesday, Rawn, speaking from his office in Boston, shared drawings of floor plans and facades that conveyed a stronger sense of his approach.

Rawn summed up his understanding of the design thrust at the Clinic as an effort to reassure patients by thoroughly policing the details of a building's design, big and small.

"It's this incredibly rigorous, carefully conceived, careful control over every detail, so you have the sense you are getting the best hospital care," Rawn said. "No one's trying to fool you [about serious illness]. You've got a big problem. But we're trying to solve it with rigor, not just with nice wood paneling."

Imparting this philosophy has been a key mission for Delos "Toby" Cosgrove, who became the institution's CEO in 2004. Since then, he has tried to brand the institution's newer buildings with a sleek, bracing modernism.

Cosgrove encouraged that look, for example, at the Clinic's expanded Hillcrest Hospital in Mayfield Heights and its recently completed Twinsburg Family Health and Surgery Center, both projects designed by the Cleveland firm of Westlake Reed Leskosky.

The Cancer Institute, though, is the first major clinical project at the Clinic's main campus conceived entirely on Cosgrove's watch.

It's also the first major building designed since the Clinic hired Foster + Partners of London to create a new master plan for the institution.

The Cleveland Clinic's 2012 master plan shows how its 166-acre main campus in Cleveland could add 13 new buildings around an east-west "green spine."

Completed in 2012, the plan shows how the Clinic could add 13 new buildings along a 22-block "green spine" running east-west between Euclid and Carnegie avenues.

Rawn was an interesting choice as architect of the Cancer Institute, because he had never before designed a medical facility.

In other words, the Clinic chose this time not to follow the more predictable path of picking a corporate firm that specializes in health-care design. Instead, it picked a gifted architect who would bring a fresh eye.

Rawn has built a reputation over the past 30 years for designing cultural facilities such as Seiji Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood and the Center for Theatre and Dance at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Rawn came off in the book as a precise, detail-oriented designer with a keen appreciation for history, not as a chest-thumping egoist out to sprinkle the globe with iconic statements.

That's very much how he sounded Wednesday.

"I'd like to think that our projects are about humility generally," he said. "They are not showy."

Rawn said he very much took his cues for the Cancer Institute from the surrounding Pelli buildings, including the 1985 Crile Building and the 1999 Cole Eye Institute.

A rendering of the lobby of the Cleveland Clinic's new Cancer Institute will feature expansive areas of glass on its south and north facades, left and right, respectively. The distance from one side to another will be 90 feet, essential the same as the distance from home plate to first base.

Along with those two buildings, the new Cancer Institute will frame a new grassy mall that's part of the Foster "green spine," with Crile immediately to the west, and the Cole Eye Institute to the north.

Like the Cole building, the Cancer Institute will feature the same rosy-hued granite chosen by Pelli.

Beyond such efforts to fit in, the Cancer Institute design shows how Rawn avoided mimicry to achieve a thoughtful, well-tailored result with its own integrity.

For example, his building will be set well back from Carnegie behind a swath of greenery and trees, a welcome contrast to the suffocating canyon created by tightly spaced Clinic buildings on either side of the avenue further to the west.

As an outpatient facility that will host hundreds of patients a day for chemotherapy infusions and other procedures, the Cancer Institute needed to provide an expansive drop-off and pickup zone.

A structural diagram prepared by Le Messurier, which engineered the new Cleveland Clinic Cancer Institute building, designed by William Rawn Associates, shows how trusses in the building's seventh-floor mechanical area suspend the cantilevered portion of the building over a ground-floor driveway.

Rawn addressed this challenge by having the upper stories of the building cantilever 30 feet over the structure's recessed first-floor façade facing Carnegie Avenue.

The building will in essence reach out to shelter a full lane of its approach driveway. Rawn sees the overhead embrace of the building-as-canopy as a way to mitigate the Clinic's daunting bigness, which can make patients and visitors feel small and insignificant.

Inside the front door, the new building will have 19-foot ceilings – just as high as the canopy outside. The effect, on the inside, should create a pleasing sense of uplift, rather than oppressive compression.

Visitors will be able to gaze directly north from the glassy entrance through floor-to-ceiling windows just 90 feet away – the distance from home plate to first base. On the far side, they'll see the new, parklike space created as part of the Foster plan.

The light-filled lobby will lead to equally light-washed upper floors, where corridors are arranged to let daylight penetrate deep into the interior, providing patients and staff with a clear sense of connection to the outside.

Rawn worked with Dr. Brian Bolwell, chairman of the Taussig Institute and his principal client on the project, to design treatment clusters in which doctors and nurses will specialize in various aspects of cancer care.

Exam rooms in those areas will lead directly to private and semi-private rooms where patients will receive infusions. All will have 10-foot ceilings with windows reaching nearly from floor to ceiling, and with views directly overlooking the new grassy mall to the north.

Throughout the building, touches such as expansive areas of blond maple paneling and details including window mullions (metal moldings) unlike others at the Clinic should create an air of warmth and precision.

The proof of the product will be how it looks and feels when it's completed. But for now, the designs for the Clinic's Cancer Institute look more promising than they might after an initial glance at the renderings made public so far.

That's a reminder that pretty pictures of future buildings generated by computers, which often oversell a design, can also fail to communicate how good it might actually be.